Imagining tyranny Thomas Keneally fictionalizes Iraq BY RICHARD C. WALLS
	The Tyrant’s Novel By Thomas Keneally. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 256 pages, $25.

Alan Sheriff would have preferred to remain unknown to Great Uncle, but a certain talent has brought him to the tyrant’s attention. Alan has written a well-received collection of short stories, and Great Uncle thinks he’s just the guy to ghost-write a novel for him, one that would expose the heinous conditions wrought by the sanctions that the West has imposed on his country. Alan is appalled by the prospect — he has aspirations to be a serious writer and can imagine the kind of melodramatic dreck that would appeal to Big Uncle. But this is a dictatorship, and you don’t say no, not even when you’re told you have only two months to do the job. What’s worse, Alan is in a delicate emotional state, his beautiful young wife having died of a sudden aneurysm. His first reaction to Great Uncle’s proposal is to contemplate the suicide that he’s been putting off since Sarah’s death.

All this seems to be taking place in Iraq, though Thomas Keneally has chosen to Anglicize and otherwise disguise the setting. Perhaps his thought was to give Western readers easy entry into the story, in which case it was a good choice. That his obviously Middle Eastern characters have names like Hugo and Matt and that an after-hours gathering of cultural elites seems like your average faculty cocktail party shouldn’t cause undue cognitive dissonance. What Keneally’s getting at here is what it’s like for intelligent and cultured folk to live in a totalitarian state, and by introducing an element of commonality, he allows us to wrap our minds around what is bizarre, absurd, and almost unbelievable. In an endnote, he tells us, "The concept of this novel arose as a result of reading ‘Tales of the Tyrant’ by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Monthly, May 2002)." If you’ve read Bowden’s non-fiction piece, you can see how Keneally has used his imagination to make the material seem less like a preposterous fantasy.

The story has two short framing sections with Alan in detention, it would seem in Australia, where he makes this now timely observation: "For the guards and prisoner . . . boredom is the great problem. For the guards, blows, and what you’d call the theater of blows, are a great opium. A morning’s entertainment!" But most of the book has him relating what he calls his "sad and silly" story to a sympathetic visitor. Tragedy occurs and life plods on. After Sarah dies, Alan finds some small consolation in a job subtitling American and British films for domestic consumption — Lawrence of Arabia, North by Northwest, Casablanca, On the Waterfront — and trying to improve on the work of previous subtitlists: "The speech of Karl Malden’s character, the priest or mullah who tells the stevedores that God is with them in the employment melee and in the holds of ships, had been so mangled, no doubt out of fear of outcries from the Intercessionist clergy of the south, that Malden might as well have been reciting a menu."

It’s the kind of interesting but not too strenuous work Alan needs to weather his grief. But in this country, even mild solace eludes you. It’s not just the prevalence of terror that keeps you off-balance, it’s the capriciousness of total power. Great Uncle is like an alcoholic parent whose moods of kindness and malice are sometimes predictable but just as often seem to be riding on some private whim. He’s also, like all ideological absolutists, delusional, and apt to wage a bad war because he can’t imagine defeat, let alone the more complicated state of not prevailing. He had, as Alan observes, "been unhinged by power, having once been a halfway normal though rather thuggish social democrat."

He’s also charismatic, a quality Alan is not immune to, even when remembering the state’s policy of shooting its own retreating soldiers and returning them to their families in black coffins marked "Renegade": "I found myself close to thinking, in Great Uncle’s austere, murmuring presence, that perhaps such thorough methods were needed for the sake of sovereignty, for the survival of the nation. . . . Power, the sad habituality of it, shone in Great Uncle’s eyes, and I was half intoxicated with that. What does one or two black coffins matter in those eyes, their immensity of reach?" But that’s a weak moment, and this Winston Smith does not fall in love with Big Brother. Instead, he decides to deliver the book and get the hell out of Dodge.

Keneally, of whose 24 books the best-known is Schindler’s List, has declared that he believes this to be his greatest achievement yet, but what kind of perspective does an author have about his own work? It is a good story, though, and if it’s not quite as enlightening as Bowden’s article, it does have more emotional tug.